Values and Beliefs

What are Values?

Values are what you spend time focusing on, things that are important to you in a specific context. Typically we have a different set of values for:

Career

Family

Relationships

Health & Fitness

All stand alone, yet all are linked too. Typical values could be:

Fun

Enjoyment

Money

Excitement

Security

Freedom

Playfulness

Seriousness

Honesty

etc.

Values Conflicts

The problem that many people have is that either their values conflict with one another e.g. Freedom and Security could conflict or values may conflict within themselves.

Often this is down to a limiting decision, perhaps you decided at some point that failure was not for you, or perhaps you decided that everything in life was unfair and doomed to failure?

Perhaps something happened in your life that led you to unconsciously decide never to be without money or success.

All these limiting decisions are what we call ‘away from’ decisions where you are motivated by what you are trying to move away from.

Perhaps you are scared of the competition and your motivation is to beat them?

Perhaps you are nervous of the way the economy is going and you are doing everything you can to not have a failed business?

Again, these are all ‘away from’ motivations – so the further you get away from them, the weaker the motivation will become and you’ll bounce right back to where you started and not make progress

These are rarely conscious decisions, but they are decisions none the less, that are often made without conscious awareness… but what to do about them?

The key is to become aware of them, then to ensure that you are focused firmly on the positive, not the negative. It sounds like a small shift but it’s not, it’s huge and will make a massive impact on your life if you can do it.

Realigning Values

The process of re-aligning your thoughts and values like this often takes some time and facilitation by an expert master coach – so here’s a quick way to start.

1. List in single words everything that is important to you about your career or running your laboratory
2. Identify what that means
3. Label if this is ‘towards’ or ‘away from’ motivated.

What is important to you about your career or laboratory?

Simply start a list of what it is important to you about your career or lab, here’s an example:
1. Fun
2. Money
3. Enjoyment
4. Helping others
5. Relaxing
6. Health
7. Progress
8. Honesty
9. Openness

Keep going until you have about 20 things on the list (this is where a Master NLP Coach can help you to get more)

Once you’ve got a list, put them in order of priority.

Identify what that value means to you

Take each item in your list and ask ‘What does that mean to me?’ then write down your answer. E.g.

‘Money means being able to relax with enough income’

Now take the opposite of that so you have a range.

Money means:

NOT being able to relax with enough Being able to relax with enough

Label whether this is ‘towards’ or ‘away from’ motivated.

Now comes the key part, look at that range, and ask – honestly – where are you? Are you 100% motivated by being able to relax? Or are you only 40% towards being able to relax and 60% away from NOT being able to relax… or somewhere else along that line?

Decide where you are on the line – what % towards and what % away from.

Now repeat for the top 8 in your list and look to see how many ‘away from’ motivations you have?

These are ALL limiting decisions that are holding you back… so in our example above the limiting decision is “When did I decide that money means being relaxed?”

Once you’ve got those decisions you can start to deal with them – again this is where a Master NLP Coach can use techniques to help you get rid of them. Simply listing them all now will indeed help you to focus your mind on what you want, not what you don’t want – right!

So it’s better today when you stop, and think, then ask yourself what you are focusing on and decide now to focus on what you do want, we all know it works as we go forwards in life… don’t we?